roscoetoon writes: "from Kelly Jackson Higgins's Blog: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=118 596An Interview With Vinton Cerf: Father Knows Best...He's probably one of the only people at Google who can remember the Arpanet or what the Internet was like before the Web. And there's one thing few people know about Internet legend Vinton Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP stack that was used to build the Internet infrastructure: His secret wish is to be an actor......He remembers the days when being called a "hacker" was an honor. "It used to be an honorific at MIT. But the abusive practices that have become so visible on the Internet has given a bad connotation here," Cerf says. "Purists wish that we could apply some other terms so as to keep 'hacker' what it once was, but I think the language has become too polluted."......This obviously isn't your father of the Internet's Internet. Cerf says the biggest threats are the proliferation of spam, botnets, malware, and denial-of-service attacks. "Much work is needed to increase the security of the Internet and its connected computers," he says, "and to make the environment more reliable for everyone."..."

eldavojohn writes: "A recent UK report is saying that Linux is greener than Windows upon deciding that Linux on a server will cause the machine to have a much longer life expectancy (up to twice) than the same machine running a Windows server. This, in turn, reduces the amount of e-waste that results from the operation of the machine. But the report doesn't stop there, it goes on to reason about open source in general: "One of the benefits frequently put forward for the use of open source software is the level of resources needed to support it. This means that for equivalent open source and Microsoft Windows systems, the open source will require less memory and a slower processor speed for the same functionality.""

narramissic writes: "According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a new policy is currently under discussion by the community of users who regularly write and maintain Wikipedia that would require contributors to the site who claim certain credentials to prove they really have them. The new policy comes after one of Wikipedia's most prolific and respected editors, who went by the pseudonym 'Essjay,' was found not to be the 'tenured professor of theology' he claimed to be but a run-of-the-mill 24 year-old from Kentucky. Said Wales, 'To discover that someone had been deceiving the community for a long time really was a bit of a blow to our trust. Wikipedia is built on the idea of trusting other people and people being honest and we find that in the most part everyone is, so it was a real disappointment.'"

Eeeyun writes: Behold The Future
The National Student has compiled the predictions of leading futurologists to show you what the future holds... Robot armies, orgasmatrons, journeys into space, tooth regeneration, mammary memory and smart yoghurt!!!

Johanna writes: "CNET: Today's super rumour is that Apple is aiming to replace all hard-disk-based iPods — the 30GB and 80GB models — with NAND flash storage, placing the hard disk in the box of toys that nobody wants to play with anymore. It should be noted this is a rumour, but a fairly well substantiated one.

[But...]

We don't expect to see a flash-based video iPod any time soon. The development of NAND flash is advancing fast, but not quite enough to consider implementation in a video iPod yet — chips have a limited capacity at the moment, but this is changing fast. We agree with [Wu] in as far as we may see a 30GB flash-based model towards the beginning of 2008."

TheG33k writes: "Game developers worldwide, why not switch to developing platform independent games, when advantages are so many?. Taking in account the increased popularity and success of platform independent games or PIGs as we like to call them, we think the time has come to develop games for all platforms."

Goffee71 writes:
Richard Joseph the man behind the music to 16-bit classics including Speedball, Chaos Engine, Sensible Soccer, and more recently, Bafta Award Winner for Theme Park World has died after a battle against lung cancer. British gamers in particular will mourn his genius.

scopius writes: As reported this morning in The Wall Street Journal, the RIAA is now pushing Congress to hike royalty rates for Internet Radio. Tim Westergreen, co-founder of Pandora.com, claims that this action will shut down Pandora, along with many other internet radio stations. The rates set by the board are.08 cents per song per listener, and this rate is in addition to royalties already paid to the songwriters of the works. Up until this point, these stations had been paying a flat fee, but these new rates will be much larger than revenues for most stations. One interesting point is that normal radio doesn't have to pay anything like this rate, they only pay the songwriters royalties, according to the article.